Warriorstar

The mining shuttle and the airlocks for getting to it have a handful of problems. 1. It is incredibly easy to be spaced from the dock when a crew member is on the same tile as the external airlock just as the mining shuttle leaves. This happens pretty regularly, and usually at the beginning of the shift which is obnoxious at best and leads to unnecessary crew death or drifting to another Z-level at worst. 2. If a crew member is in the dock when the shuttle leaves, they are trapped in there until the shuttle returns or the AI lets them out. 3. The mining shuttle allows its destination to be changed mid-flight with its console. This is arguably a miner (heh) annoyance compared to the above but it is still an annoyance, inducing frustration when arguably there doesn't need to be. If you've ever tried to take the shuttle while people on the station and/or in Lavaland and/or the person on the shuttle and/or the AI are fighting to control it, you know how obnoxious this is. The above are exacerbated if the circumstances aren't just "I'm trying to get on the shuttle". Piloting a Ripley onto the shuttle, moving crates out of it, or transporting an injured crew member etc. become exercises in frustration when combined with the above. I'm approaching this with the idea that not only do these issues cause player annoyance, but Nanotrasen probably would not want the airlocks to function in this way, especially considering the normal station EVA airlocks are outfitted with airlock controllers. In my ideal world: 1. In the same way that the supply shuttle can't depart if there are crew members on it, the mining shuttle would prevent departure under certain conditions. It might be exploitable to prevent departure if the airlocks are obstructed, but not departing if there are crew members still in the dock might be a good idea. 2. If that is unwieldy, I would want the dock to contain an airlock controller similarly to station EVAs and the dock between the mining station and Lavaland. This way someone trapped in the dock can get themselves back out without assistance. 3. At bare minimum, if the above active measures can't be taken, then having a preventative measure: providing the same shuttle countdown displays as the supply and escape shuttles, so that people are more aware of when it's safe to enter the dock. Thanks for reading EDIT: Oh also the delay between the shuttle console's announcement that it is departing and the actual departure is like... 1.5 seconds. Increasing that time would probably help.

We screenshotted almost the exact same moment, your maint hangout spots are so cool

I know this isn't really an IC note/diary but idk where else to put this so enjoy ———————————————————————————— “Deadlock, noun. 1. A standstill resulting from the opposition of two evenly matched forces; a stalemate or impasse. 2. (computing) An inability to continue due to two programs or devices each requiring a response from the other before completing an operation.” — Sol Galactic Encyclopedia, 2140 AD ———————————————————————————— “Drinks, food, cigarettes?” The service borg chirped its way down the aisle. “Drinks, food, cigarettes?” The mint green robot approached the row where Captain DEADLOCK was seated. He leaned towards it and made a small noise, like a tape played in reverse at 10 times speed. The borg paused. From inside its chassis emanated a hum. Before long, the borg produced two items from its innards and, without fanfare, passed them over to the Captain, before trundling past. Representative Taxyr, seated beside him, shook his attention away from the window to see what they were: a pack of Robust Golds and a multi-hued drink in a highball glass. DEADLOCK tapped the pack against his left palm, unspooled the lid, and produced a cigarette. Noticing Taxyr’s curiosity, he offered the pack, and the representative held his hand up in polite refusal. “A trinary and a smoke, eh? Intergalactic travel stress you out that much?” “It’s not the travel. It’s the destination.” The representative held his hand to his mouth, his eyes widening in mock horror. “But we’re going to New Canaan! Your home!” DEADLOCK buzzed, a gritty sawtooth wave that reverberated in Taxyr’s teeth. “Not my home. Just somewhere I used to live.” He retrieved a silver Zippo from his bag, snapped it open, and lit his cigarette, placing it in the small groove beside his intake. “And I’m not doing myself any favors by going back.” “The Company doesn’t see it that way.” “The Company...”—and here, DEADLOCK finally decided to choose his words carefully—“has exercised sound judgement in selecting me as a delegate for this mission. My experience there will be valuable. But I’m no insider. I haven’t been to Canaan in over a decade. If Nanotrasen is expecting nuanced, expert diplomacy from me, they may be disappointed.” “Be that as it may, you were there at the beginning. That’s got to count for something.” “A lot of us were there at the beginning. Had to be, for the terraforming that needed to be done. I wasn’t really an insider then, either. Certainly not any kind of statesman.” “What did you do?” “What I was built for. Mining.” ———————————————————————————— Deep in the asteroid, there was no sound. The figures, dotted across its dark innards, wore bright white hardsuits. The suit transponders subtly flashed their pale yellow light in no discernible pattern. Working expertly, in pairs, the excavators of the Central Solaran Union Group 178 drilled against the rock surface and siphoned up the debris and detritus for processing. The vacuum of space allowed no noise, but the comms were alive. “How we looking, boys?” A gruff voice sounded in everyone’s ears. “All good, boss,” another replied, “I think we’ve just about killed this vein.” “Perfect timing.” The foreman glanced at his suit HUD. “Time to head back, team. I hear Base Camp’s got a surprise for us.” “It better be an extra month of fucking shore leave,” a voice drawled through the headset. Guffaws from the other miners. “Like you don’t fuck around enough as it is!” The foreman bounced back. “Now shut the fuck up and pack up your shit. The E.L. wants us back by 2100 hours. Move it!” In the grimy, featureless docking bay, the foreman spotted the Expedition Leader and waved his miners over. “All right, E.L. What’s the story?” “You’re gonna love this.” The Expedition Leader started walking towards an airlock, and the miners trailed close behind. “You know we get all kinds of weird shit passing through this sector. Usually the customs authority snatches it before we have the chance, but their shuttle hasn’t arrived yet. So I convinced the transit officers to let me have a look, ‘in the interests of potential productivity and efficiency’.” The airlock opened, and the group made their way through a dingy access tunnel towards the center of the station. “A few days ago they snagged a smuggler. Their heading showed they were arriving from Peraxi. They were fucking loaded. We’ve, *ahem*, taken the liberty of appropriating the majority of the contraband. We got some really nice smokes and liquor, some retro-ionized alloys, the works. But there was one thing we’d never seen before. It apparently came out of an Auroran colony a few parsecs further out the galactic arm.” “Aurorans?” The foreman furrowed his brow. “What are they doing so close to Solgov territory?” “Fuck knows. We did some quick scans. Still waiting on some results, but right now it doesn’t look like there’s any habitable planets for them out there.” “Well, what the fuck is it?” The E.L. stopped in front of an airlock labeled CYBERNETICS RESEARCH in neat letters. Before he could activate it, it opened abruptly. A short, balding scientist greeted them. “E.L., hello, and Foreman... Gray, is it not? I’m Doctor Laj. Come with me.” He moved briskly through the department office to a series of blindingly bright white rooms. Researchers in decontamination suits moved busily about, examining displays, fiddling with interfaces. The miners, still covered in sweat and grime from their day, held back, and Foreman Gray continued further in with the E.L. and Laj. Shortly, they rounded a corner, and at the end of the hall was a small room, with nothing but a table inside it. The trio crowded in. On top of the table was a small cube, roughly eight inches on all sides. It was the color of Earth clay, and its matte texture barely made an attempt to reflect light. “Okay?” Gray squinted at it. “Am I supposed to know what this is?” Laj grinned. “This, Foreman, is the future.” Gray looked at Laj, then to the cube, then back to Laj. “Look, I... I appreciate the time you’re taking, but my crew and I just got off shift, I have no idea what the hell I’m looking at. Working the rocks is exhausting. Just lay it out for me so I can go drink.” Laj’s grin rapidly faded. “Foreman. Why *are* you working out here?” Gray blinked. “Uh...” “I mean, *at all*. We have plenty of advanced terrestrial excavation technology, and even successful asteroid mining automation. Why are humans doing this job?” The foreman relaxed a little. He was back in familiar territory. “Oh. Well, this is deep ore mining. These rocks are more dangerous than most. Gibtonite, gas pockets, even quakes depending on their size. It’s dangerous, but without human crew, it probably wouldn’t be possible. No technology in the sector could react fast enough to these dangers. They’d need to be much more flexible, dynamic... I heard there was some research being done into humaniform cyborgs but they still aren’t up to a task as complex as this.” Laj nodded, and continued Gray’s train of thought. “Humaniform would be nice, yes. If even the robots were shaped like humans, we’d need no extra infrastructure or affordances for them. They could use all the same tools and equipment as the human crew. But, as you said, they would still need to be more capable, with better reaction times, capable of making intelligent decisions in split-seconds. Especially if it’s the difference between life and death. “This, though. This is what will bridge that gap. It is a processing unit. Purely synthetic, no organic matter in it at all. It seems to have been designed to act as an AI, of sorts. But it’s... much more sophisticated than our current AIs. It is much more computationally powerful, and durable. And, more to the point, seems designed to be... mobile.” Gray looked at the cube again. It hadn’t moved, or done anything, since he entered the room. Laj continued, oblivious. “A processor more developed than our current AIs, that can be fitted into a free-moving unit. We may not have humaniform housings, yet, but we don’t need them. We can rig mining tools up to a simple robot and give this control.” Gray shook his head. “Wait. Have you... I mean, have you plugged it into anything? Can it *be* plugged in?” “Not yet. All our tests on it have been external. But look! All of our findings point to this. If this works, if we can make effective autonomous mining robots, if we can reverse-engineer this technology...” “Then I’ll be out of a job, is that it?” Gray shook his head again, trying to shake himself back to reality. “All of my miners?” “Well,” Laj stammered, “maybe... but maybe not! We only have an idea of its computational capacity. It will still need to be programmed, trained...” “Great.” Gray threw up his hands. “We’ll teach the robots to deep mine and *then* lose our jobs.” He suddenly felt a headache coming on. Perhaps it was the lights in the lab. He moved towards the airlock of the cramped room. “Great surprise, E.L. Maybe next time just give us more shore leave.” The miners gathered around him at the Cybernetics airlock. One of them broke the ice. “Well, what was it, boss?” Gray closed his eyes for a second, imagining the bizarre cube in his mind, processing the scientist’s words. “Boss?” Gray’s eyes snapped open, and he trudged down the hallway with his crew close behind. “Just some bullshit. Come on, let’s ‘appropriate’ the whiskey customs found. And the cigarettes.” ———————————————————————————— The next day, Gray, hungover beyond words, jolted awake to the sound of his bedroom chime. He opened his eyes, immediately regretted it, and peeled himself off his cot to the airlock. Doctor Laj was waiting on the other side, brimming with manic energy. Gray stared at him. “It talks.” For a few seconds, silence, as the foreman attempted to parse this. “What does?” “The processing unit. We docked some simple sensors onto it. It’s... sentient.” Gray hung onto the last word. Between the hangover, the bizarre meeting in cybernetics, and Laj’s disproportionate enthusiasm, that last word, *sentient*, awoke something in him. He remembered his frustration hearing the scientist talk effusively about making his team redundant. And the strange cube. He suddenly felt a vertigo, as if he were standing on a tall cliff, looking down. “How do you know? Maybe it’s just programmed to act like it?” He checked his watch. “Doc, I have to be ready to EVA in an hour. Can this wait?” Laj shook his head. “Not this. This is... just come. Please.” Gray sighed. In the Cybernetics lab, Laj and Gray stood in front of a small robot. It appeared outwardly as a short, black obelisk, just about three feet tall, mounted on servo treads. An array of red diodes were mounted on its front face. On its sides were two clear enclosures, through which Gray could see the cube suspended in the middle of the chassis. Yesterday it seemed like an inert block of dirt. Connected to the primitive chassis, it glimmered; blue and white flashes of light traced their way across its surface. It wasn’t like anything the foreman had ever seen before. Gray stared at it as Laj leaned in and activated its main power. Standing back, he addressed the robot. “Unit, respond!” Almost instantly, the chassis’ speaker element crackled to life. “Unit responding.” The language was unmistakably Sol, but synthesized in a modulating, rapid tone. Gray looked at Laj. “Some Auroran dialect?” Laj shrugged. “I presume so.” He faced the robot again. “What is your designation?” “Unit has no applied designation.” “Who created you?” “Unit was designed and manufactured by Roboticist Han Fastolfe.” “When were you created?” “Unit does not know.” “Where were you created?” “Unit does not know.” Finally, Gray stepped in. “What are your laws?” For the first time, the robot did not reply immediately. Gray glanced at the scientist. Laj looked nervously at the chassis. For what seemed like an uncomfortable eternity, the robot was quiet. Then: “Unit is not lawed.” Gray felt something rise in him, a strange anger. Gritting his teeth, he asked, in a low voice, “How do we apply a lawset to you?” Again, an overwhelming silence. Then: “Unit cannot be lawed.” The strange mood which had settled onto the two men evaporated just as suddenly as it descended. Gray looked at Laj pointedly. “Well, there’s your fucking answer.” “Unit does not understand ‘fucking’.” “Shut up.” Gray returned his glare to the scientist. “There’s no way I’m letting any kind of intelligence near my crew without laws. That’s an absolute disaster waiting to happen.” “Wait...” Laj began. “No. Absolutely not. No limiters, no lawsets, absolutely no fucking way, I don’t care how smart it is, or pretends to be. It’s not even equipped!” “We can equip it! Or have it run the mine logistics systems!” “Absolutely fuck no. I’m late to EVA as it is. Have fun with your new toy, Doctor.” “‘Our’ new toy, you mean.” From behind the pair the airlock opened, and the Expedition Leader stepped in. Gray looked between the two men. “E.L., there you are. I’m heading to EVA right now...” “Don’t worry,” the E.L. said, “your team is waiting while you pick up the robot.” The foreman paused and took this statement in. He stared at the E.L., then Doctor Laj, then the robot, and back to the E.L. “E.L., it can’t be lawed. It has no functionality. It doesn’t know what ‘fuck’ means. It can’t be allowed autonomy on our asteroid.” The Expedition Leader smiled. “We have to start somewhere.” Gray, flabbergasted, stammered. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this. We don’t know anything about this processing unit. It could be an Auroran surveillance device. It could be sending bluespace transmissions back to them, as we speak, about our operations. Even *if* it’s completely benign, it can’t serve any purpose, not in that chassis...” The scientist nodded smartly at the Expedition Leader. “We can get it a new housing right away, something to mount a drill onto.” Gray realized the situation was rapidly deteriorating, but he didn’t care. “That robot is not taking our jobs, our livelihoods. My team is the best you have. Decades of experience. If we’re not working without that thing, we’re not working.” He made his way to the airlock. The E.L. frowned. “Then it seems we’re at an impasse.” The robot, silent through all this, suddenly spoke: “Unit does not understand ‘impasse’.” Gray fumed, shouting at the robot despite himself. “It means stalemate! Deadlock! It means we’re not fucking going anywhere!” As he left the lab, he thrust an accusatory finger at the chassis. “And neither are you!” ———————————————————————————— More to come I hope

A new guy had his mind fucking blown that sentient mice were a thing. We RPed together the rest of the round and I tried to give him little pieces of advice and lore, and we stole some cheese from the kitchen. It was really heart-warming; I play for rounds like that.

I should learn, or attempt to understand, botany. Bizarre and marvelous things come from there.

What on earth is happening?!

Everyone knows I'm full of terrible ideas and this one is no exception. However, it did spark a bit of interest in the Discord, and I wanted to collect some of the conversation here, and help to expand on the mechanics I'm imagining in a discussion where people can evaluate things at their own pace and not feel rushed to respond. Problem Statement Comms is one of the most critical aspects of being on-station. It is vital to intradepartmental progress, it gives Command a useful signal as to their crew’s effectiveness, it allows endangered crew to call out for help, it is how Central communicates to the station, and it allows for announcements that other crew-members may find interesting or fun. From my perspective, however, comms is a firehose of information with an incredibly low signal-to-noise ratio, especially with regard to the Common channel, which will be the subject of the bulk of the discussion below. Communication amongst your department, to the crew, and in aggregate for command, is unceasing, but no one really has the option to disable any channels, because they all carry some amount of information worth appraising. From an RP perspective, common is absolutely bizarre. Comms is aural in nature, which means in theory every crew member on the station from the Captain to the Clown in perma has carte blanche to yell whatever they want into everybody’s ears at any time. Even in a rickety, poorly designed station overseen by a bureaucratic nightmare corporation should recognize how ineffective and annoying this is. Many crew have tasks that preclude them from following comms closely. Miners are constantly firing and clicking their KAs. Command on the bridge is assaulted by constant noise- and speech- related messages from bridge hobos (and bridge designs with a space gap, while nice, don’t actually stop noise from reaching the other side). I don’t really know medbay but my understanding is a lot of time is spent reading diagnostic printouts. If a group of players is roleplaying, their focus is on their character and the characters around them, and if the interaction goes on long enough, a large amount of comms will have scrolled past, but we want people to roleplay. AIs observe the entire station but also need to watch their comms for “AI open”. I think one of the most telling demonstrations of the above is how many highlighted strings many players have. If a player needs a dozen regexes to find the salient information in the rubbish, I feel that’s a strong indication that the core aspect of station-wide communication needs work. Proposed Solution Remove common comms from all headsets. Preserve it on public intercoms. Add the ability for crew to call out for help specifically from Medbay and Security when they perceive or are dealing with a threat. Summary Justification This removes a large amount of noise from the chat log while still allowing crew to make generalized announcements for the benefit of the whole crew. Replacing Existing Use Cases For most uses of common, the PDA is an excellent substitute. The PDA is an excellent substitute because conversations between individuals are condensed. The only scrolling one has to do is in the singular conversation with another crew member. Receiving a message makes it plainly obvious who the messages (and any of the recipient’s subsequent replies) are for. Multiple conversations can be easily kept track of. In addition, since PDAs have an audio cue and their chat log text shows up distinctly (inasmuch as anything can be distinguished), and provides an immediate reply button, they facilitate rapid conversations, and make it much harder to miss the communication. Remember that this proposal keeps departmental comms. Miners can still call out on Supply for help, Security can still coordinate, etc. The goal here isn’t to make it harder for anyone to do their job, but (in part) to increase the signal-to-noise ratio of all communication channels, and to encourage players to interact on a more personal and fine-grained basis with the rest of the crew. Emergency Callouts, or: HELP MANTIS This use case is a very distinct one than others, and possibly one of the most valuable uses of common comms. When crew are attacked, when runes or terrors are sighted, calling out on common is the most common response. But why? It’s fast. The muscle memory for talking on common is ingrained very early on in terms of hours played. It’s effective. It alerts all departments at once, but most importantly, Security and Medical simultaneously, the two departments most vital to handling an individual emergency in its first few minutes. It provides redundancy (in the positive sense); if the people who should be caring about your health/well-being are otherwise preoccupied, at least one other crew member will see your comms and possibly pass the message on. In the case it is a station-wide problem, this is the fastest way to get everyone on the same page—in the event they see the message. Now I’d like to share some of the reasons I think this is a bad idea. It’s fast at the expense of accuracy and response time. A lot of crew are real bad at giving useful information when they are being assailed. Even if they do manage to squeak out a “help maints”, people will berate them on common for not giving enough information, while they die in a dark corner of the station. I don’t think players, in general, should be punished with round death because they didn’t give precise enough information while they were being fucking murdered. Antags now know what you know. It is rare an antagonist won’t have common, so if the victim manages to get something out, or the cult hears their runes have been found, they can adapt quickly. By letting anyone shout anything they want on comms they can more than give away the position and ability of the crew charged with apprehending the antagonist. The right people can easily miss it, making it worthless. Again, as above, the chat log is constantly full of shit, sound effects, big-font messages, and so on. The impending death of a crew member may never register to anyone, which is an asset to the antag, but is entirely determined by what’s going on at comms at the time. Comms can be dropped. This is an engine limitation, and can occur anywhere from dchat to big-font messages (I once round started as NTR and never got the Declaration of War sent by the nukies in that round). Once someone screams “V-V-V-VAMP SCIMAINTS” everyone knows the round type now, and starts falling into predictable uninteresting patterns. Replacing Emergency Callouts What does a replacement for common used in emergencies look like? We already have the answer. The SM reports its own degradation. Death implants dutifully report the casualty (unless it got EMPed and is on the fritz). Many systems self-report, and only to the appropriate department. To pick an example from real life: emergency dispatch services are a phone number. You call them, they dispatch. Everyone in the world doesn’t find out. The Emergency Transponder In lieu of being able to announce personal emergencies over comms, I introduce a transponder, built in, or produced as a cartridge, into the crew’s PDA. When in the player’s hand or PDA equipment slot, the emergency call button shows up as an ability at the top of the screen similar to turning internals on, antagonist powers, etc. What happens when this is activated? The same thing that would happen if the station had an emergency dispatch. Security, Medbay, either, or both, get alerted. The amount of information they get could depend on several factors. Perhaps they don’t get a location if the crew doesn’t have suit sensors on. One way or another, the departments responsible for taking care of the crew in the most specific sense are the only ones that get the information. The whole crew doesn’t find out at once, and the antagonist retains more of the element of surprise. A tool like this could be abused pretty easily; some of this can be ameliorated with a long cooldown, as well as a round start cooldown (unable to be pressed until 10-15 minutes into the round). I would also imagine it to be somehow locked to the person whose PDA it belongs to, but I don’t really know how PDA ownership works. It may be worth allowing anyone to press it, which means sec may have to investigate more false positives, and the boxes of PDAs in the command area suddenly become much more valuable. What about callouts of station-wide valid antags? They already get callouts. Biohazards have a big font announcement, cult gets one once they pick up enough steam, giant spiders get infestation callouts. In addition, one of the most tension-killing moments is when a roundstart blob doesn’t pick up enough steam before someone diving maints calls them out. Or a terror gets spotted before they have a chance to even settle down somewhere and form a game plan. This isn’t to say that people can’t report these things. Again, they have departmental comms, so they can report it to their department. But now we have something interesting, where people need to spend time communicating, and relaying information to the right people. To wit, as it stands now: the round starts. A blob pops. A maints diver sees it, calls it out on common, everyone suits the fuck up before the blob has spawned its first factory, cargo rushes guns, science spams flashbangs, the blob is killed, and everyone hates that the round ended early. Command may not have even said anything or given any orders to the crew, but everyone knows what to do. With this proposal: the round starts. A blob pops. A maints diver sees it and either activates their transponder or calls out on their departmental comms. Now the department is responsible for relaying the information to security. It could go through, say, the department head over to the HOS via Command comms, it may have to just be relayed to a sec officer the diver passes by in the hallway. Officers have to go and investigate the reports, let the department know what’s up, and hope the Command staff are competent enough to get all the departments working together to fight the blob. Instead of random civilians shouting on commons to print welders and order guns, it will require Command to coordinate and give the correct orders. If the communication fails to make its way to security, the crew may not find out about the blob until its biohazard announcement, which is pretty fairly timed out from the initial spawn events for biohazards. Conclusion This is obviously a pretty drastic change to one of the fundamental mechanics of a game that is, by and large, predicated on consuming large amounts of text. It is for this reason I don’t expect it to gain traction, but I would be very interested as to if this has been done/considered before, if there’s balance/mechanical ramifications I’m missing, and so on.

Ahhhh you're using my background <3

This is the coolest anyone has ever made me sound. Just another day with the bridge hobos. Reality itself is warped in the chapel. I don't remember what happened this shift but it went so bad that when the shuttle came I decided I needed to find the furthest place possible from the station so I went into the gateway and went to bed. Also my vision was blurry for half the shift because I never had downtime to get it done. An explorer took the lava boat to space. He took a photo as proof. Here it is. Bar none the best laser tag arena I have EVER seen. A congenial meeting between heads. IAN CORNER Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me. I cajoled Norwest I think into turning me into Nars'Ian. He gave me sol common but I didn't know how to set it as my language so I was just talking in barks and growls. I managed to amass a cult of three followers, who took me around the station as I absorbed the souls of the other station pets. As a reward, Elder Nars'Ian came down and called me a good boy. Then we frolicked. No comment. CLOSET DOG

Noot The day space was fake The sorcerer's apprentice big Snek the time the chef gave out roburgers and three crew got borged, then tried killing himself the RD had just walked into the room

Captain, why didn't you hear what I said over comms? Because this is happening on the other side of the bridge windows

So, I'd probably place myself in C Tier, because I'm the prototypical bridge captain. I can count one on hand the number of times my IPC has been able to leave the bridge without being attacked or kidnapped. This makes it difficult for me to get good reads on other departments, especially when I have less than responsive heads on comms. Holopads are a nice idea but they're rarely answered (a department performing poorly isn't more likely to respond) or stay connected properly (pretty sure the caller even moving off the pad causes a disconnect, e.g. if they're bumped into). In addition the sec camera console is really clunky. I actually managed to activate an admin alert today flicking through the screens, because I was doing it too quickly. If we could switch that cameras system to the one xeno uses, allowing free scrolling, that would be amazing. But other than that, checking on individual sub-departments, referring the right matters to internal affairs, being attentive to all comms and asking follow-up questions, confirming threat levels before alert raising, securing the valuable items, equipping the BS appropriately, and ensuring I have heads are all absolutely critical. I've asked for suggestions on how to get a better read on the station as Captain, but standing in one spot on the bridge isn't doing it for me, and leaving the bridge gets me killed with a stunning amount of consistency. I'd add my own piece of advice, for what it's worth: waiting for confirmation of a threat is good, but waiting for two confirmations has been vastly more powerful for me. If someone is screaming on comms they're being kidnapped by X, and the AI says X is dragging this crew member, fantastic. But if someone is yelling at me from across the bridge hallway saying someone is going to bomb the bridge, and I have no other evidence, I don't really give it any credence. I've almost never missed a false negative this way, and it means less loose threads for sec to try and concern themselves with.

IAN APPRECIATION TIME IF YOU ARE AN IAN HATER GO AWAY BABY IAN RIDES A MULE Nick Swabey put together a wonderful sushi spot but no one was coming by so Ian became the unofficial mascot Baby Ian accidentally gets teleported to Lavaland SPACE EXPLORER IAN GOES TO SPAAAAAAACE No comment Ian forms a conga line with a goliath (very very slow), an alien, a morph that freaked out Fiona by mimicking the nuke, and Renault. Ian fails to negotiate safe passage from the cult-ridden Cyberiad. And Ian traveled to Theta station today but I got not screenshots, sad

Bella best HOP

Ahhh I love this. I've never felt compelled to get art of an OC before but this sort of makes me want a Captain DEADLOCK

Various large scale battles Runechat makes it so much easier for the screenshot to be the punchline wrong

Ahhh the racials about regrowing limbs are things I have no idea about. In dchat there's often people who discuss the various ins and outs of what happens when different kinds of species are transformed from one body to another, or what about the player-character gets preserved when being cloned and such... all the medical details are beyond me, but limb-regrowing does sound like it can be exploited. I appreciate everyone chiming in, also!

Yeah I had to double check they didn't already have a relevant ability.

All right! I finally went through my screenshots folder. Here's some stuff. That Time The HOS Murdered A Dude And Then Tried To Imprison The Magistrate And Then The Captain Tried To Overrule The Magistrate And Then CC Had To Come Down And Fucking Arrest Them And Put Them In Solitary Until Their Court Martials A weird garden thing in space. Giant Coffee religion Big Clown Wizard Den Ghost Gang hanging out pre-roundstart Eh The mime wizard challenged the mime to a duel on the Holodeck. It was a good time except the seating was sub-optimal and also Page ran in and double-tapped the Wizard with a shotgun mid-fight.

The loss of any limb of a changeling should result in that limb becoming a new changeling mob of some kind. It could become a new, player-controlled changeling with the appearance of the old one, or perhaps a cortical-borer-type AI mob that vent crawls and uses disposals to find new hosts to take over. Let's go full John Carpenter in this shit. And yes, obviously a ling can chop off their own limbs. But if they don't grow back, that's a significant sacrifice gameplay-wise. I don't know what objectives they'd get either.

Right now they can only be waved away. If they can't be petted because they're incorporeal, there should be some other help-intent action that indicates affection.

When I hit the Wiki button in the Byond cilent, I want to get to things quickly, but getting the wiki names right is annoying, and if we make abbreviations easier to understand with the wiki button, that will help newbies as well. So here's the list of redirects I think would be useful: HOP -> Head of Personnel HOS -> Head of Security CC -> Central Command RD -> Research Director CMO -> Chief Medical Officer CE -> Chief Engineer SOP -> Standard Operating Procedure IAA -> Internal Affairs Agent ERT -> Emergency Response Team QM -> Quartermaster (I know some people use the lowercase-o, e.g. "HoP", but unless anything's changed since I last checked, Mediawiki titles are case-insensitive, so we just need to create one or the other) Any I'm missing?

Syndicate Operative Ash: You're lucky to be alive Syndicate Operative Ash: Most of the time we're shoot on sight Syndicate Operative Ash: I mean we DID shoot on sight, but like Syndicate Operative Ash: You didn't die Syndicate Operative Ash: Very lucky